Dr Carla Thackrah
doctoral research & thesis
music, sound & video portraits
1. INTRODUCTION
What is a portrait?
What is being portrayed; how it
is being portrayed; why it is being portrayed.
What makes a 'good' portrait? Is it a good likeness to the body or mind of the sitter or is it something else? See the mind map
Note: We rely on an undefinable human instinct when we look at a face - we can see gender, age, mood, disposition, character - we can even make judgements as to whether they are a 'good' person or not. We hear the oft used phrase "I'm a good judge of character" or not, as the case may be. In this way an artist's portrait of a sitter must rely on 'instinct' - the artist's personal view of the sitter is as instinctual as is the instinct of the viewer of the finished portrait. It's quite possible they may come, via their own instincts, to very different views as to 'who' is the sitter.
2. THE PORTRAIT'S CHANGING FOCUS
From Renaissance to Post Internet/Digital Art of now as parallels the changing views of individual identity.
From the Primitive era when portraits reflected early mans’ focus on fertility and bodily survival with simple body outlines, genitalia and no distinguishing facial features.
Egyptian era where identity was tied with the Gods and portraits were the carriers and home of one’s Ka or spirit;
Greek and Roman periods of Socrates & Plato when individuals strived for an ideal form and portraits reflected this;
Early Christian Medieval era where religion dominated and no human individual could be seen as separate from (or equal to) God;
To Renaissance where the modern portrait as we know it today was born. Where the individual was seen as separate from God; where Descarte pronounced “I think therefore I am” and separated mind from body and man from God; where early medicine and anatomy brought new understandings to drawing the human form; where the non-Royal but prosperous merchant class demanded portraits to display their wealth and status; and the first stirrings of psychology brought a desire to understand an individual’s “motions of the mind’ (Da Vinci);
To the Modern era, the discovery of photography and other means of mechanical reproduction; the growing power of the middle classes as well as enormous developments in psychology brought a radical shift in the focus of portraits. In Abstract, Impressionist, Cubist, Expressivist portraits, artists no longer strived to draw a convincing physical likeness rather the artist attempted to interpret the deeper, psychological reality of a subject.
To Post Modernism and now, Post Internet/Digital era where the definition of self has come full circle; where the autonomy and veracity of an individual’s personal definition has been convincingly questioned and we are now seen as merely simulacra dependent on social and cultural dictates and portraits are depicting merely the surface of an individual that is, essentially not an individual but a product of our common humanity where the negotiation and interpretation of the subject, the artist and the viewer is of equal importance in the defining of a self.
In both Chapter 1 & 2 I intend to lay the foundations of what is a portrait – particularly is mimetic likeness needed?
Given the changes in late 20th century portraiture I would contend that it is NOT needed to convincingly portray an individual. If this IS the conclusion, then the use of sound and music becomes an almost ideal way to ‘suggest’ the ‘reality’ of and individual self.
3. THE PORTRAIT AND ITS CANVAS
What is the canvas for a post internet/digital portrait?
3a. LIGHT WITHIN SPACE is manipulated to create a meaningful canvas for image (Hollander, Langer)
The historical portrait existed in many mediums – sculptured stone and other materials; oil and acrylic paints on canvas, board, wall and other mediums; charcoal, pencil, watercolour on paper; other liquids that can make marks such as blood, ochre; photograph on film. Particulartly now, in the age of digital image on screen, light is the pre-eminent canvas
From the chiascura lighting of some Renaissance portrait painters, the Northern school in particular, to images in photography and digital film created entirely by the interplay of light, light is one of the central conveyers of meaning and animator of feeling in portraits. A play of light suggests meaning rather than imposes it. Anne Hollander, Roland Barthes speak of light as being effective in delivering the added meaning, the third meaning, the air, the tone.
3b. AIR WITHIN SPACE is manipulated to create a meaningful canvas for music
Sound portraiture inhabits a completely different 'space' - a space with little solid tangibility; a space created by the displacement of AIR by tone, timbre, rhythm and dynamics.
3c. TIME WITHIN SPACE is manipulated to allow an eternally flexible canvas for the depiction of a subject in both film and sound/music.
Film and music is seen and heard in linear form. With MONTAGE or editing its very existence in time can be used to subvert time
We can
Create time
Manipulate time
Control time
In a digital sound and image portrait, time becomes ‘vertical’. Film is made up of a series of ‘stills’ (Eisenstein, Barthes) and music made up of a series of sound ‘moments’ (Stockhausen, Kramer) and this vertical time can be used to create, manipulate and control linear clock time via ‘montage’ (Eisenstein)
Film/image: Eisenstein first developed the ideas behind editing or 'montage' to essentially alter absolute clock time, to re-define time to convey the meaning, the tone that the artist wishes.
Music/sound: Jonathan Kramer talks of the different time contexts in which music sits, and how music can redefine time from the absolute clock time of linear music to the 'vertical time' of 'moment music'. It is through the manipulation of time that music can express meaning.
Particularly interesting is both their uses of the term "vertical time" or stasis.
For Kramer in reference to music, much non-linear, non tonal twentieth century composers (Stockhausen, Morton Feldman etc) create music that is made of discontinuous moments a "single present stretched out into an enormous duration, a potentially infinite 'now'" (p55, 1988) This creates a time within which every moment is packed with meaning and is not dependent on what went on before or after that moment.
For Eisenstein, 'vertical montage' is an important element in his thinking. 'Vertical montage' relates both to the idea that film is a succession of 'stills' much like Kramer's continuous 'moments', as well as the ability of editing or montage, to be able to alter time radically; to make it stop, slow, speed up, run backwards, flash back or forward, overlay.
The still is a quotation, the inside of a fragment, packed with information. The still is read instantaneously and vertically and therefore rejects linear absolute time.
When the stills are edited with music and sound the information becomes even more dense by means of the editing - fugal or contrapuntal. Through montage or editing, the series of stills can subvert clock time completely and force the viewer see the mass of information / meaning held vertically.
As Barthes says the film created and read in this way "throws off the constraint of filmic time ... and requires a reading that is instantaneous and vertical ... it creates indescribable meaning" (p68 1977)
Historically, to my thinking, these ideas relate to the Renaissance painting where the artist has attempted to convey the character, education, status, personality, wealth of their subject in a moment of time by placing within the canvas as much information as is possible - either as actual objects, the expressions and clothes, metaphors carrying meaning and import. Holbien's The Ambassadors is a perfect example of such a painting - one that expresses much about the subjects in a single moment of 'vertical time'
Cubist painting, with its depiction of all sides of a sitter or object, even the inside, is another fine example of 'vertical time' in paintings.
4. THE 3RD SPACE
All of these are manipulated via Montage which enable the 3rd meaning (Barthes) or the 4th dimension (Eisenstein) or the stasis of 'being' (Kramer) to emerge.
The 3rd space offers the viewer / listener, the 'inside' of a moment; the void or depleted place where the obtuse meaning can be found; the place where the audience can create their own space past imposed narrative and meaning. Barthes, Hollander, Kramer and others offer insight into this place.
The '4th dimension' of Eisenstein is when we move past music as 'heard' and image as 'seen' and into the visual and aural overtone as 'felt'
The static, non-goal oriented non-linearity of 'moment music' (Kramer, Stockhausen) allows the listener to be in the non imposed space of sound where personal meaning can emerge..